by Nick Fishman

We found this post on HRResouce.com about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) enforcement efforts to ensure that employers are hiring legal, documented workers: I-9 Audits Return, Verification Expands.  The post was so informative that we didn’t mind the plug for the author’s services at the bottom.  See excerpt below:

ICE had openly abandoned the use of audits and administrative fines for employers’ technical noncompliance with I-9 procedures on the theory that employers seeking to make money from knowing employment of illegal workers will just build such fines into their cost of doing business. Instead, ICE has focused its limited but rapidly increasing worksite enforcement resources on raids and prosecutions in order to achieve the maximum deterrent effect through well-publicized convictions of managers and companies and seizure of company assets, as well as business interruption losses from removal of large numbers of workers.

These actions are part of a larger no-nonsense enforcement strategy articulated with increasing clarity by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who has started making State of Immigration speeches describing the multifaceted efforts by the department’s various components to rebuild confidence in the government’s willingness and capability to conduct practical immigration enforcement, while working administratively to streamline and expand legal immigration under existing law and continuing to prove the case for more comprehensive reform. “We are not going to have a silent amnesty,” Chertoff has stated.

It’s not new news that ICE’s efforts are gaining momentum and the ball seems to be rolling towards a federal mandate on E-Verify or alternative Electronic I-9 Confirmation programs.  You just wonder if it will ever happen.  Getting the federal government to agree on anything right now is no small task and with upcoming presidential elections, the political landscape could undergo a major shift.  Who knows?  We’ll just wait on the sidelines and keep you informed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 9:42 am and is filed under Blog Roll, I9 Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.